Adventures in Teaching Kids How to Code

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Author: tefcodeclub

We are super pleased to announce that all the Code Club UK projects are now available online. If you’re a parent or teacher, you can start using the materials now, without registering a club. If you’re curious about running a club, you can look over all the materials before you make a decision, but If you want to run a Code Club, you’ll still need to register with us.

We’ve done this to help more kids learn and create on a computer. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Code Club yet, but many children do have access to a computer at home or in the classroom. The projects are aimed at 9 to 11 year olds, but there is no reason why younger children and grown ups can’t learn too.

Although we’re releasing our projects today, they’ve been developed in the open for the last year, and we want to thank each and every one of the volunteers who have helped us with new projects, translations, and each and every typo fixed. We’re hoping that now the projects are open for all, it will be more tempting to start new Code Clubs.

We are really looking forward to seeing our projects being used by as many people as possible, and hope you can help spread the word on their new found openness (and if you find a mistake, or have a new idea for a project, come and join us on GitHub: http://github.com/codeclub).

Last weekend Linda and tef went to Bletchley Park, along with 600 designers, developers, and hackers for two days of talks, workshops and coding. Friday included Linda’s talk about Code Club, and a tour of the Computer History Museum, before everyone went off to build amazing things. Saturday included tef’s talk about social issues in programming, the Scratch workshop, and the hackathon presentation.

Some of the students from the workshop got on stage to show off what they had written in Scratch, including a racing game, another demonstrated their Minecraft map of Bletchley Park, linked up to a robot which moved in tandem as you explored the map (which won a prize!).

Just before we left, we went back to the computer museum for a quick tour, and to speak to some of the volunteers. We even got a souvenir printed out on punched taper, which is now proudly on display in our office.

We had an excellent weekend, and would like to thank our students, the OTA organisers and participants, and The National Museum of Computing too.